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Gunfire as the plane comes in low overhead, a white explosion bleaching his senses, consciousness spinning out for a blink before it returns, limping behind instinct. Neil doesn’t realize he’s pulled the trigger even though his ears are ringing from the blast and he sees the black bloom spreading over Vincent’s belt, the look frozen on his face.
The dirge of engines fades, the light fading with it, and in the sweeping shadow Vincent holsters his sidearm and sinks to one knee.
Neil drops his own and rushes to him, tearing unsteadily through the grass. He stumbles once and his fingers scrape the dirt.
He makes it just in time. He takes Vincent in his arms to guide his fall, lets him down graceful as a dance, a slow duet buckling into the earth. Neil goes down with him, holding him. Vincent’s eyes burn like dying coals.
Neil harbors no hatred for him and could not summon it if he wanted to. He’s certain he never wanted to. Vincent’s gaze searches over him and finds a fissure, prying open an abyss, echoing and endless. An awareness of absence that had not been there before, not until this moment. Possibilities unexplored, longing unfulfilled, infinite and then erased. Too late, now.
Neil’s arm bumps the sheathed muzzle of the gun underneath Vincent’s jacket, cold as ice. Every shot had been his own. Only one had found its mark. One is all it takes.
“Go, go,” Vincent urges. “Get out of here.”
“I will.”
“Go, while there’s time.”
“I’m saying goodbye.”
Vincent smiles weakly, but it’s stronger than the pain. Stubborn as hell. His thumb grazes the narrow stripe of skin where Neil’s shirt rides up over his waist, consoling. Neil’s chest is a burning building, caving into dust. He aches.
“Maybe in another life,” says Vincent.
“In another life,” says Neil, broken by a swallow, “we would have been brothers.”
“Brothers?”
The smile splits wide on his ashen face. He guides Neil’s hand against the wound and presses down. They gasp in unison.
What have I done? It really hits you like that. Some things are true like bad poetry and as cheap and hollow, too. Rotten on the inside. Three years in McNeil, seven in Folsom, and now the rest of his life. He’ll be serving out the sentence handed to him right here, in the barren fields of LAX. It feels as if the tears trapped in his eyes are spilling back down into his throat, filling up his lungs, drowning him from the inside out. Vincent’s blood is hot against his palm, hot all over his lap.
The way his lips take in Vincent’s shallow dwindling breaths is anything but brotherly. Above them another roar begins to swell, descend. He brings his free hand to Vincent’s cheek, drawing them close, bedded down together in the dry grass. It doesn’t matter. No one will see. No one will ever know but them.
Soon, only Neil will know. He will carry it with him forever, that Vincent is kissing him back, kissing him fiercely even as he’s dying, clawing their last farewell back from the brink. Hanging on for as long as he can. Holding out just for this. The plane drones past, its unseeing headlamps fluorescing through Neil’s closed eyes, another flood of white that burns and blisters. It rolls over in a wave. Bright, and then dark.
Neil feels him go. His bloodied hand comes to the other side of Vincent’s face as he pulls away, silently shaking under a blank, metallic sky. He stays there for a long time. When at last he rises to leave, he unclips Vincent’s bracelet, slipping it inside his pocket.
He makes it out alone. The 11-o’clock news reports two surviving fugitives still at large, but Neil knows better. That night, he leaves the tarmac a burial ground for two, and the city of L.A. a ghost.